Dragon Economics 101

03 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History

Tags

Artillery, Belgium, Cathedral, Cloth Hall, Dale, Esgaroth, Great War, howitzers, Laketown, Lonely Mountain, No Man's Land, Smaug, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, trenches, Ypres

Here is a postcard of the town of Ypres, in southern Belgium, in the years before the Great War, with its famous Cloth Hall and cathedral.

The Cloth Hall was begun in 1200 and finished in 1304, being a center of the woolen trade in the region.

The cathedral was begun in 1230 and finished in 1370.

Then the Great War began and Ypres was just behind Allied lines.

Artillery had begun in the Middle Ages, as something which looks like a high school science experiment (plus armor).

By 1914, it was much bigger and much more efficient.

(The German says, “Our Growlers!”—perhaps a soldier’s slang word for heavy howitzers like these?)

And, as the war progressed, bigger and more efficient yet.

And even more so—to the point where some guns became so big and heavy that only railways could move them around.

Needless to say, when shells from such guns hit Ypres, the damage they caused was enormous.

image9ypres

And not only to Ypres, but to the whole region—entire villages disappeared, as did forests, landscapes became moonscapes.

For some months in 1916, Second Lieutenant Tolkien walked through, lived through, this devastated world,

image12jrrt

which took many years to be repaired.

And, in the meantime, the economies of Europe suffered, with so much damaged or shifted to war work, and governments left with enormous debts, both the victors and the vanquished.

This devastation made us think about another devastation, first described by Thorin in Chapter One of The Hobbit, and, of course we wondered if JRRT thought of the damage caused by the endless, pitiless bombardments as he wrote about the ruin brought by a dragon.

Thorin begins, as we did at the opening of this posting, showing a peaceful, prosperous world:

“Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the fun of it, not to speak of the most marvellous and magical toys, the like of which is not to be found in the world now-a-days. So my grandfather’s halls became full of armour and jewels and carvings and cups, and the toy market of Dale was the wonder of the North.”

But, just as the Great War came to the ridges north of Ypres, so Smaug came down upon the town of Dale just below the Lonely Mountain and to the Mountain, as well:

“Then he came down the slopes and when he reached the woods they all went up in fire. By that time all the bells were ringing in Dale and the warriors were arming. The dwarves rushed out of their great gate; but there was the dragon waiting for them. None escaped that way. The river rushed up in steam and a fog fell on Dale, and in the fog the dragon came on them and destroyed most of the warriors…Then he went back and crept in through the Front Gate and routed out all the halls, and lanes, and tunnels, alleys, cellars, mansions and passages…Later he used to crawl out of the great gate and come by night to Dale, and carry away people, especially maidens, to eat, until Dale was ruined and all the people dead or gone. What goes on there now I don’t know for certain, but I don’t suppose any one lives nearer the Mountain than the far edge of the Long Lake now-a-days.”

Thorin is correct about this: Dale is ruined and abandoned (you can see the remains of the town on the right hand side of this illustration) and the Mountain has only one inhabitant.

When Bilbo disturbs him and steals a cup, Smaug goes on a second rampage, flying as far south as Lake-town:

“Fire leaped from the dragon’s jaws. He circled for a while high in the air above them lighting all the lake…Fire leaped from the thatched roofs and wooden beam-ends as he hurtled down and past and round again…Flames unquenchable sprang high into the night. “ (The Hobbit, Chapter Fourteen, “Fire and Water”)

And, even when Bard’s arrow brings him down, Smaug causes a final wave of destruction:

“Full on the town he fell. His last throes splintered it to sparks and gledes. The lake roared in. A vast steam leaped up, white in the sudden dark under the moon. There was a hiss, a gushing whirl, and then silence. And that was the end of Smaug and Esgaroth…”

Just as certain parts of Europe were destroyed and their economies stunted by the Great War, we can hear, in Thorin’s words, that the same has happened to Dale and the Lonely Mountain: with no dwarves and no men to make the “armour and jewels and carvings and cups”, not to mention the “most marvellous and magical toys”, the whole economy of the area to the north of the Long Lake was completely destroyed. Survivors built up Lake-town, but no one dared to revive the trade which had once enriched an entire region.

And, as for the few remaining dwarves:

“After that we went away, and we have had to earn our livings as best we could up and down the lands, often sinking as low as black-smith-work or even coal-mining.” says Thorin.

Although Thorin dies in the struggle to regain what was lost, there is a happy ending of sorts for the dwarves. With Smaug dead, they can finally return, as can men, and rebuild, just as Europe began to rebuild—Ypres restored both Cloth Hall and cathedral in time.

image18ypres

But the dragon would return and all too soon…

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

“Dragons, Other”

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps

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Arthur Rackham, Beowulf, C.S. Lewis, Chrysophylax, Custard the Dragon, Dragons, Dream Days, Esgaroth, Farmer Giles of Ham, Jabberwock, Jabberwock-slayer, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll, Lonely Mountain, Luttrell Psalter, map, Middle-earth, Narnia, Ogden Nash, Pauline Baynes, Rumer Godden, Smaug, St George, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dragon of Og, The Hobbit, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, The Reluctant Dragon, Through the Looking-Glass, Tolkien, Walt Disney

As always, readers, welcome.

One of us is currently teaching a class where our present focus is upon The Hobbit.

At the center of the book is the Lonely Mountain and at the center of that is Smaug.

This got us to thinking about other dragons in our experience, and some of those are not quite of the same breed as the hoard-sitter faced by Bilbo and the dwarves. That dragon is closely related to the Beowulf variety

which, unlike Smaug, has neither a name nor (it seems) human speech, but it certainly has the same suspicious streak: when an escaped slave steals a cup from its hoard, it’s almost immediately aware that it’s missing and suspects a human.

And they are both vengeful. As Smaug devastates Esgaroth, even if he dies for it,

so Beowulf’s dragon scorches the countryside in revenge for the theft.

But what about those other dragons?

First, we thought of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days (1898),

a collection of short stories, the next-to-last of which is “The Reluctant Dragon”.

This is the story of a beast the very opposite of Smaug—no hoard, no suspicion, no flaming violence, and, in fact, a poetry lover. This story was then converted into a Disney cartoon of 1941.

Needless to say, although the core of the plot is the same, what makes the Grahame distinctive is the language. All of the major characters: the dragon, the little boy who finds him, and St. George, who is brought in as a dragon-slayer, are thoughtful and articulate late Victorians who would rather discuss literature than do battle—a far cry not only from Beowulf’s encounter, but also from every other earlier depiction we could think of.

The sword in this last one looks like it actually belongs in the hands of the jabberwock-slayer

in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872).

Here’s a LINK to Dream Days so that you can enjoy the story for yourselves.

Nearly sixty years later, the comic verse writer, Ogden Nash,

produced not a literary dragon, but a timid one in “Custard the Dragon” (1959).

This is a poem in 15 stanzas and is a story about Belinda and her pets, including a dragon, who is taunted by the other pets as being less than brave. To underline this, the last line in a number of stanzas is a variation upon the first version of the line, “But Custard cried for a nice safe cage”. (Here’s a LINK to the poem.)

The surprise is that, when a pirate climbs in through the window (this happens all the time here—possibly they escape from dreams?), Custard promptly eats him—and the cries of “Coward!” disappear immediately.

In contrast to the unnamed dragon in “The Reluctant Dragon” and in “Custard the Dragon”, our next dragon is a talker—like Smaug, but also like Smaug, potentially malevolent. This is Chrysophylax in JRRT’s 1937/1949 Farmer Giles of Ham. (JRRT is having a quiet joke here—“Chrysophylax” is Ancient Greek for “Goldguard”.)

The artwork is by Pauline Baynes (1922-2008).

If, like us, you’ve loved the Narnia books, then you know her as their original illustrator.

She was also the artist for an early Middle-earth map.

Her 2008 obituary in The Daily Telegraph tells of how they came to work together:

“In 1948 Tolkien was visiting his publishers, George Allen & Unwin, to discuss some disappointing artwork that they had commissioned for his novella Farmer Giles of Ham, when he spotted, lying on a desk, some witty reinterpretations of medieval marginalia from the Luttrell Psalter that greatly appealed to him. These, it turned out, had been sent to the publishers “on spec”by the then unknown Pauline Baynes.” (The Daily Telegraph, 8 August, 2008)

JRRT was then so impressed with her work that it appeared both in other later publications and his recommendation led to her being engaged by CS Lewis’ publisher for the Narnia books, as well. (And here’s a LINK to that obituary, which has more on Tolkien and Baynes, as well as Lewis.)

And the Baynes connection leads us to one further dragon, that in Rumer Godden’s (1902-1998) 1981 The Dragon of Og, for which Baynes provided the cover art.

It’s not our practice to discuss work we haven’t read, but we’ve just discovered this novel and have already put it on our spring reading list. The little we know about it comes from a blurb or two, but it looks promising: this is more of the reluctant dragon, but one who is in danger of being provoked by a new local lord until his wife steps in and cleverly changes the situation.

Before we close, however, we want to look back for a second at the Tolkien/Baynes connection and add two further things. First off, here’s the first page of JRRT’s graceful letter of thanks and praise to Baynes for her work in illustrating Farmer Giles.

Second, as the Telegraph obituary says, Tolkien was impressed with her versions of the marginalia from the Luttrell Psalter, which is high on our list of favorite medieval manuscripts.

In our next, we want to spend some time looking at that work, thinking about marginalia, and not only there, but also in the work of another favorite illustrator, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939).

Till then, thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

A Long Stretch

12 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

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Agincourt, Archery, arrow bag, arrows, Bard the Bowman, Battle of Poitiers, Casula Mellita, Crecy, Edinburgh, English Longbowmen, Esgaroth, Greco-Roman, gunpowder, harpoon, Hundred Years War, Laketown, longbows, Medieval-Renaissance, Napoleonic Wars, Naval Warfare, Pinkie Cleugh, Roman, sailing, Smaug, The Hobbit, The Mary Rose, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In the past, we had a posting on Bard the bowman

who rescued Esgaroth (Laketown)

from the attack by Smaug.

(We especially like this Jeff Chan Bard not only because Bard is depicted as he is in the book, as an archer, but also because it includes the thrush who tells him where he is to strike.)

In that previous posting, we suggested that JRRT pictured Bard as looking and acting like one of the English longbowmen of the Hundred Years War

rather than as a harpooner, as in the film.

Since that posting, we did a second which included bowmen, just a few weeks ago, about Mogul-knife and arrow wound, and now we would like to add a third.

As we’ve mentioned before, one of us is preparing a new university course to be taught in the autumn on the history of warfare. As you can imagine, this is a big subject, but, in the process of shaping it, we want to include a week on developments in naval warfare over the centuries. So far, we’ve divided it into several parts:

a. Greco-Roman

b. medieval-renaissance

c. the age of sail

d. ironclads

e. dreadnoughts

While working on the Medieval/Renaissance section, we were reminded of what might be the most famous Renaissance shipwreck: the sinking of The Mary Rose, 19 July, 1545.

Medieval naval battles had been primarily infantry battles transferred to the sea, as had been Roman practice. That practice was a story in itself—the traditional Roman explanation was that they were land-fighters and so had invented a device, called a “corvus”–that’s “crow” in English—probably because the point at the enemy’s end was a bit like a pecking beak. This was a kind of gangplank which, dropped onto the enemy’s ship, stuck in place and allowed Roman marines to rush across and deal with their opposite numbers.

Things began to change with the invention of cannon in western Europe. (The history of gunpowder in the Far East is its own subject—and one we urge those interested to have a look at. Here’s a LINK to get you started.) Used first on land perhaps by the 13^th century, the first recorded use of cannon on a ship dates from 1338 (and here’s a LINK to naval artillery, in case you want to know more).

With cannon, you could stand off from an enemy ship and—your choice—cripple it by destroying its sails and rigging—or sink it with holes below the waterline.

Boarding, as the Romans had, was still a possibility, of course, and provided the extra benefit, if the boarding was successful, of allowing for the acquisition of an extra ship. This could be added to your fleet or sold and the profits shared among the sailors—or, actually, if we go by Napoleonic British standards, the profits went to everybody at the top, including admirals who weren’t even present at the capture, with a teeny amount remaining for the seamen who’d actually taken the prize.

To do that boarding, Romans—and medievals—had loaded their ships with soldiers, and the Mary Rose was no exception, its surviving records suggesting that there were about 200 soldiers in a crew of approximately 400-450.

As a number of longbows have been recovered from the wreck,

this would suggest that many of those soldiers were archers.

These, along with the artillery (and perhaps a small number of arquebuses? To our current knowledge, none has been recovered from the ship, but, certainly, by 1545, they were in common use—at the battle of Pinkie Cleugh, east of Edinburgh, in 1547, the English army had several hundred German mercenary arquebusiers),

would have supplied the missile weapons of the ship.

Not only were large numbers of artifacts discovered in the Mary Rose, but the skeletons of perhaps half its crew and about 90 of those were intact enough to warrant further study. For our purpose, one, in particular is very interesting.

Discovered in the hold, he was a large man for his time, about 6 feet (about 183cm). As well as revealing that he would have had a powerful build, his skeleton displayed repetitive stress injuries to his upper body. There is discussion as to the pull-weight (how much muscle power it takes) of the longbow of the medieval/Renaissance period, estimates ranging from 90 to about 150 pounds (we’re sorry that we can’t readily convert this, as it isn’t pounds of weight, but pounds of force—the general idea is that it would have taken huge muscle power in either case), but, for a bow as tall as a bowman, this would have demanded great muscular strength—which would then have, over time, put huge stress upon an archer’s body. This has then led archaeologists to suggest that he was a bowman.

And this brings us back to Bard, the actual archer, and a suggestion as to what he might have looked like.

JRRT only says:

“But there was still a company of archers that held their ground among the burning houses. Their captain was Bard, grim-voiced and grim-faced…Now he shot with a great yew bow, till all his arrows but one were spent.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)

“a great yew bow” makes us think of the English bowmen we’ve mentioned before, and those we believe were in Tolkien’s mind, the victors at the battles of Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415).

To produce archers who could pull such powerful bows (and fire up to 10 arrows a minute, as we’ve mentioned in a previous posting), English archers began training as boys and continued throughout the years—as athletes of the bow, they had to keep in shape. Such training and exercise would then have produced men like that discovered on the Mary Rose—big-shouldered, strong-armed—and given to the subsequent damage inflicted on the body by archery wear-and-tear.

So, might we then see Bard as not only “grim-voiced and grim-faced”, but “broad-shouldered and imposing”? To which we can add this from The Hobbit:

“In the very midst of their talk, a tall figure stepped from the shadows. He was drenched with water, his black hair hung wet over his face and shoulders, and a fierce light was in his eyes.” (Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)

All of which gives us: “tall, black-haired, fierce, grim-voiced and grim-faced”—and, at our suggestion, “broad-shouldered and imposing”—a worthy portrait of Bard the Dragon-slayer.

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

It’s not known what our Mary Rose archer was doing in the hold at the time the ship went down, but perhaps he was seeking to transfer extra ammunition to the main deck? That ammunition would probably have been in the form of coarse linen bags carrying 24 arrows each—here’s a modern reconstruction

and here’s the LINK to the site from which it comes. This belongs to an amazing woman whose website is full of her life on the edge of the Great Plains, in Kansas, USA—home of Dorothy of the OZ books, of course– as well as her photos of things like the reconstructed bag in the photo above. Below is a picture of the Kansas tall grass prairie.

One More River (2)

28 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Amon Hen, Anduin, Bilbo, Blondin, Bombur, Boromir, Brandywine, bridges, Bruinen, Bucklebury Ferry, Celebrant, Dwarves, Elrond, Elves, Enchanted river, Esgaroth, Fangorn, ferry, flight to the ford, Frodo, Gandalf, Gondorians, Hoarwell, Hobbiton, Isen, Khazad-dum, Niagara Falls, Nimrodel, Old Forest, Old Man Willow, Orcs, Prince Valiant, Rivendell, Rivers, Rohirrim, Sam, Tharbad, The Hobbit, The Long Lake, The Lord of the Rings, Theodred, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, Weathertop, Withywindle, Wraiths

Welcome, dear readers, as always. In our last post, we had turned our attention to water-crossings in The Hobbit. In this, we want to continue our study with The Lord of the Rings.

We were first prompted to look at such crossings by something Boromir said, almost in passing:

“Four hundred leagues I reckoned it, and it took me many months, for I lost my horse at Tharbad, at the fording of the Greyflood.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 8, “Farewell to Lorien”)

Tharbad had once been famous for its elaborate defenses and bridge, but, symbolic of so much of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age, it had fallen into decay and was abandoned, the water of the Gwathlo, the Greyflood, spreading wide—an easy place to lose a horse—or a man.

And perhaps Boromir’s loss is also symbolic of the higher level of stress involved in crossing water in the later work. The most Bilbo and the dwarves had to deal with was a water of forgetfulness, whose effect wore off in a relatively short time. There is much worse to come.

The first crossing (after The Water in Hobbiton)

has danger attached, but it’s a danger which pursues the hobbits at the Bucklebury ferry. Here, pursued by one—or more—wraiths,

they cross over by what is a kind of do-it-yourself ferry, where the ferry runs on a cable, which keeps it available and on course, while the passengers pole to add propulsion.

There is a puzzle at their next crossing—because the hobbits don’t appear to have crossed at all! This is the River Withywindle, on whose bank the hobbits meet up with Old Man Willow (not as in the film, where he’s been pulled violently out of context and replanted, for no good reason we can see, in Fangorn’s forest).

Until we began to study water-crossings, we had never really thought about what happens then. The hobbits come to the river, having become lost in the Old Forest. Pippin and Merry are swallowed by the tree. Tom Bombadil comes to the rescue: but how do they cross the Withywindle? We just couldn’t remember! So we went back to the text, saw Tom lead the four hobbits through the forest, where they almost lose him, then they hear: “Hop along, my little friends, up the Withywindle!” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”)

And so they never actually ford across or are ferried across. Instead, they walk up its course to Tom’s house, which seems to be near the source.

The next crossing is many miles away—over the Barrow Downs, through Bree, past Weathertop, to the Last Bridge, over the Hoarwell. Although Aragorn is anxious that the Wraiths will have gotten there before them, they pass safely and keep moving southwards, towards Rivendell, until, near the ford over the Bruinen, the Nazgul catch up with them at last.

There is a bridge, of course, at Khazad-Dum, although, as far as we can tell, there is no water even in the depths far below it.

Escaping from Moria, the Fellowship reaches two streams in a row and, as far as we know, none of the prominent illustrators has given us pictures, either of the tributary Nimrodel or the main river, the Celebrant, so we provide a rather generic picture to offer a rather general idea.

The Nimrodel is shallow enough to wade across, but the Celebrant is wider and deeper and the Elves provide a rather iffy method of transport: a single line of rope to balance on, making us imagine something like the famous Blondin crossing Niagara Falls in 1859—well, a little!

The next crossing is almost inadvertent, or, at least happens sooner than expected: the Fellowship has been paddling down the Anduin, but, putting in at Amon Hen, things go disastrously wrong. Boromir tries to take the Ring, the orcs appear, Boromir is mortally wounded, and Merry and Pippin are carried off (in our edition—the 50^th Anniversary, One Volume Edition—this takes all of 12 pages—quite a narrative feat for JRRT!), before Frodo (and Sam) cross the river to the east and story begins its major split.

[We might insert here, although, in The Lord of the Rings, it’s only a footnote that at the crossing of the Isen, during this time, Theodred, son of Theoden, is killed.]

After this, there is only one more crossing of any significance, but it’s not by the main characters: rather, it’s by the orcs, who use boats to assault and capture west Osgiliath, which is the subject of one of our earlier postings.

To which we would add the return crossing, days later, of the Forlorn Hope of Gondor and Rohan, on their way to challenge Sauron (and to distract him from Frodo and Sam).

To finish up this posting, we provide a chart below (clearly now one of a series, after the earlier one on doorways and passages) of the water-crossings found in the two books.

Crossing	Characters	Outcome	Source
Tharbad	Boromir	Loses horse	The Lord of the Rings
The Water	Bilbo	Joins Dwarves	The Hobbit
An unnamed river	Bilbo, Dwarves, and Gandalf	Lose baggage	The Hobbit
Rivendell	Bilbo Dwarves, and Gandalf	Helped by Elves	The Hobbit
Anduin	Bilbo, Dwarves, and Gandalf	Transported by eagles	The Hobbit
Enchanted River	Bilbo and Dwarves	Bombur drugged	The Hobbit
Underground river	Bilbo and Dwarves	Using barrels, Bilbo and Dwarves escape	The Hobbit
The Long Lake	Bilbo and Dwarves	Gain help from Esgaroth	The Hobbit
The Brandywine (Bucklebury Ferry)	Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin	Escape Wraith	The Lord of the Rings
Withywindle	Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin	Reach Tom Bombadil’s house (never actually cross river)	The Lord of the Rings
The Bruinen	Frodo and Wraiths	Elrond causes river surge, Nazgul driven off	The Lord of the Rings
Khazad-Dum	Balrog and Gandalf	Gandalf defeats Balrog, but falls down with him	The Lord of the Rings
Nimrodel/ Celebrant	Fellowship and Elves	Fellowship brought into Lorien	The Lord of the Rings
Anduin	Frodo and Sam	Set out on journey to the east	The Lord of the Rings
Isen	Rohirrim and Orcs	Rohirrim driven back, Theodred, son of Theoden, killed	The Lord of the Rings
Anduin	Gondorians vs Orcs	Gondorians driven back from West Ogsiliath	The Lord of the Rings

This is our last posting for the year 2016 and we close the year with thanks to all who follow our blog or simply stop in for a visit. In 2017, we plan to continue our Tolkien travels, sometimes employing the Sortes Tolkienses, as well as to use Tolkien’s world to visit others, beginning with a posting on “Famous Bridge Battles”, from Boromir and Faramir jumping off one to escape the orcs, to Napoleon at Arcola, and beyond. Here’s a taste…

We also plan to explore other worlds and perhaps to add a review section for books and films we think you might enjoy.

In the meantime, thanks, as ever, for reading. Happy New Year!

MTCIDC

What sad and surprising news! Princess Leia is no more– but no– Princess Leia will always be with us, just like the Force.

_87060782_starwarsap3

One More River (1)

21 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Maps, Narrative Methods

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Alan Lee, Beorn, Bilbo, bog people, Bombur, Boromir, bridges, causeways, drowsiness, Dwarves, Esgaroth, Great East Road, Greyflood, Gwathlo, Hobbiton-across-the-water, Lethe, Middle-earth, Mirkwood, Rammas Echor, Rivendell, river-crossing puzzle, Roman Roads, Tharbad, The Atlas of Middle-Earth, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Tollund Man

Welcome, dear readers. Here we are again in Middle-earth, as so often we’ve been over the last couple of years, but, as we said in our last post, one reason why we revere JRRT and his work is that it’s so rich—it seems like one can open it to any page and there is something new to explore. In this post, we began with an odd little detail, just something said almost in passing by Boromir:

“A long and wearisome journey. Four hundred leagues I reckoned it, and it took me many months, for I lost my horse at Tharbad, at the fording of the Greyflood.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter VIII, “Farewell to Lorien”)

Tharbad, we knew from the Companion, was once a river port on the Gwathlo, Boromir’s “Greyflood”. Here’s a description from the extremely helpful introductory section of the Companion called “The Maps of The Lord of the Rings”:

“…with long labour a port capable of receiving seagoing vessels had been made at Tharbad, and a fort raised there on great earthworks on both sides of the river, to guard the once famed Bridge of Tharbad” (lxv)

This “once-famed” bridge was clearly long-gone by the time, at the end of the Third Age, when Boromir reached the river it had once offered passage over, for all of the work done once upon a time, including long causeways—raised approach roads above boggy ground—here’s a Roman example from northern Spain with causeway and bridge—

“But in the days of The Lord of the Rings the region had become ruinous and lapsed into its primitive state: a slow wide river running through a network of swamps, pools and eyots [little islands]: the haunt of hosts of swans and other water-birds.” (from a letter of 30 June, 1969, to Paul Bibire, quoted in Companion, 650)

JRRT appears to have left no description of the bridge itself, but we imagine it as looking rather like a Roman one (as JRRT could have seen pictures of surviving ones like this in Portugal

or this in Rome.

Unlike much of the rest of the Roman world, no Roman bridge survives in Britain—only the remains of piers, ramps, and approaches–so we’re assuming that, if he were at all influenced by Roman architecture—and that’s an absolute assumption on our part, we admit, but certainly things like Hadrian’s Wall seem to have been an inspiration—see our earlier posting on the Rammas Echor—it was through photographs.)

This mention, however, sparked us to think about the crossing of bodies of water, both in The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings, just how many there were, and the kinds of events which happened at them.

Bilbo’s Bag End, of course, is just down the road from The Water and its mill, as depicted by Tolkien himself.

When he sets off with the dwarves, however, there is little incident involved in running water at first. The party has to cross a river, “swollen with the rains, [which] came rushing down from the hills and mountains in the north.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”) They cross this by “an ancient stone bridge” (perhaps like this one at Carrbridge, in Scotland?)

but, somehow, they can’t escape the river, as, during the night, “…one of the ponies took fright at nothing and bolted. He got into the river before they could catch him; and before they could get him out again, Fili and Kili were nearly drowned, and all the baggage that he carried was washed away off him.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”). So far, when it comes to running water, for all that there was a bridge, it seems difficult for the dwarves to stay out of it.

Their second adventure with water is more successful, when they cross the bridge at Rivendell, which we have discussed in a posting on Rivendell architecture, so, for this one, we’ll simply add Tolkien’s illustration of Rivendell, plus a real favorite, Alan Lee’s of the bridge.

Beyond Rivendell, it’s into the mountains (literally, when they are pulled into the world of the goblins by a secret door) and, when they come out, their next water barrier is surmounted for them when they’re rescued by eagles and flown to the other side of the northern Anduin.

If they had simply taken the Great East Road (as we presume Bilbo and Gandalf did on the way back), they would have found a ford where the road runs eastward into the Old Forest Road. (see Karen Wynn Fonstad, The Atlas of Middle-earth, 80-81, for a larger view).

The real problem with a crossing comes at the next water course. They had plunged into Mirkwood

and come up across a stream (in fact, the Enchanted River, although they didn’t know it). During their leave-taking at Beorn’s, he had warned them about it:

“There is one stream there, I know, black and strong which crosses the path. That you should neither drink of, nor bathe in; for I have heard that it carries enchantment and a great drowsiness and forgetfulness.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 7, “Queer Lodgings”)

As people with a background in Greek and Roman mythology, we immediately thought of Lethe, the name of which comes from a Greek verb which means “to escape notice/be hidden—therefore, to forget”.

It was one of the rivers of the Underworld and, if you drank from it, you lost all memory of your past. In that part of classical religion which believed in reincarnation, it was one step on the way to returning to earth.

Here in Mirkwood, however, the point is to avoid drinking, or even touching, it. The difficulty, of course, is that, if you can’t touch it, how do you get across it, especially when:

“There had been a bridge of wood across, but it had rotted and fallen leaving only the broken posts near the bank.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 8, “Flies and Spiders”)

Providentially, there is a boat drawn up on the opposite shore and we’ve always been reminded here of what is called a “river-crossing puzzle”. There are many variations, but the earliest currently known dates from the 9^th century AD, and is found in Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes (maybe something like “Puzzles for Sharpening [the Minds of] Young Folk”—which makes it sound rather Victorian). We provide links here for: River crossing puzzle, Fox, goose and bag of beans puzzle, and Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes, for anyone interested to learn more.

In the case of the dwarves, the math goes awry when the largest of them, Bombur, accidentally falls into the water and becomes comatose.

(And this Alan Lee drawing oddly reminds us of “bog people”—that is, the bodies of people, the earliest being from 8000BC, a majority being Iron Age, found in peat bogs throughout northern Europe. Because of the conditions in bogs, some have been amazingly preserved, such as “Tollund Man”—here

)

He eventually awakes, long before the party’s next river, which acts as a moat to the caves of the Elf king of Mirkwood.

This has a bridge, across which, at various times, Thorin, the dwarves, and Bilbo (wearing the Ring) go.

It is the next bit of water, however, which bears the greater interest. This is the underground stream which comes up in the cave where the elves store empty wine barrels to return to the men of Esgaroth. And this, the dwarves and Bilbo don’t cross, but ride down, packed in (or perched on) those empty barrels.

This leads us to the last body of water: the Long Lake, on which Esgaroth stands. From here, the people of Lake Town convey them back north to a landing place from which they will start out for the Lonely Mountain and the climax of their quest.

And here we’ll end our quest for water-crossings for this posting, to be continued with one on The Lord of the Rings in our next—along with all of those extras which we can’t help adding, from medieval puzzles to peat bog people.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

If you celebrate this time of year for any reason, may your celebration be a happy one! We mostly dream of toys…

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Esgaroth

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